I've always dreamt of something extraordinary happening, like in a film ... but in the end it means death. The Crazy Locomotive

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Nowhere in the film is the potential of cinema better demonstrated than in the film’s ending. In its otherworldly grace and scorching memorability, Jadwiga’s closing monologue (and Gillies’ film as a whole) serves as a resurrection of the supernatural and a celebration of the corresponding powers of cinema.

The conflict between art and science, materialism and metaphysics, is personified in the rupture between S. I. Witkiewcz (know as Witkacy), ‘the most universal artistic figure in Poland in the first half of the 20th century’, and Bronisław Malinowski, 'the father of contemporary anthropology', on a train between the Australian cities of Brisbane and Toowoomba at the very beginning of World War 1.

Using adaptions from their writings, including a new translation of Witkacy’s play The Crazy Locomotive, the conflict between the friends is evoked in the context of Australian colonialism and the outbreak of technological mass suicide. An experimental docudrama, the work can be viewed in a cinema or incorporated into an immersive installation that seats the audience as passengers/cinema spectators within a carriage/cinema traveling into the future.